


Until My Dying Day

by Sorted



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Death, DEATH STORY GUYS, Death, M/M, don't read it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21875266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorted/pseuds/Sorted
Summary: Two scenarios: "If Dorian Dies First" and "If Bull Dies First."
Relationships: Iron Bull/Dorian Pavus
Comments: 23
Kudos: 65





	1. Prelude

**Author's Note:**

> As nice as it is to imagine Dorian and Bull growing old together in their villa, I've never believed that will happen. With the dangerous lives they lead and the life expectancy in Thedas, I've always thought one or both of them....well. So this is how I think it would go. I'M SORRY. Why am I even posting this. :P

Dorian and Bull didn’t talk about The End. They didn’t want to spoil their time together at the villa with such topics. Only once—they speculated briefly.

“I dunno. Retirement sounds nice, but I think I’d go crazy with nothing to do.”

A smile. “As if there weren’t many, many things you could do. You only mean to say you’d go crazy if you weren’t fighting anymore, you simple-minded lout.”

“Hey, it’s what I do. You’d lose it too if you couldn’t do your book thing anymore.”

“Yes, but for me, the prospect of retirement is a beautiful one, simply _filled_ with books.” A sigh. “If I survive Tevinter long enough to get there.”

“You’d better, Vint.”

A wry smile. “You too. Though I do worry. The risks you take…”

Bull sobered. “I guess we both do,” he said, touching one of the scars Dorian had gained that one time he’d been captured and nearly killed before Bull got to him.

Fingers interweaving: “Realistically, it would be a miracle if we both survive that long. Though I don’t want to think about it.”

“Yeah.”

A pause; kissing. More than kissing. A while later, a little roughly, “I don’t think I could go on without you,” Dorian breathed.

A serious look. “That’s not good to hear.” Dorian snorted, but Bull continued, “I’m proud of what you do, Kadan. I believe in your work. If I go early, I hope you’ll find a way to keep…you know. Saving the world.”

“You ask a hard thing,” Dorian murmured. “Will you do as much, if my enemies get to me first?”

A slow nod. “I think so. I’ll try.”

“And…will you be alone?”

One eye met Dorian’s eyes. “You mean _this_ way, don’t you?” His arm tightened around Dorian, who nodded. Bull hummed. “Probably.”

“I’d rather…” Dorian swallowed. “I don’t like the thought of that. I’d rather you find someone else.” He laid his head against Bull’s chest. “I want you to have someone loving you every day of your life.”

“Not sure I’ll be up to that one, Kadan…but if I have to, I’ll try.”

A small smile. “Let us hope, instead, for the miracle of retirement.”

\--

There was no miracle.

\--


	2. If Dorian Dies First

When Bull heard about the assassination of Magister Dorian Pavus, he just stood still. Cadash was standing there before him, nose and eyes all red, and he hadn’t seen her in two years, but he couldn’t think of a single word in any language. He wasn’t really sure he knew who was talking to him. Everything was blurry and muted and far, far away…

Far away in Tevinter, miles and miles away, where Dorian had died, sudden and violent, and his empty shell had already been turned to ashes.

Bull went through the motions. Remembered how to talk, eventually. Said goodbye to Cadash again. Wasn’t sure where she was headed. Didn’t remember.

He handed the Chargers to Krem, who cornered him alone and cried until his tan face was a mess, begging him not to do this, not to go. Swearing at him. Even punching him. Poor Krem. He was desperate. But Bull couldn’t help him this time.

“I’m going north, Krem-puff. I got nothing left to give you. I can’t even do what he wanted me to. All I can do is…go.”

“At least let me _be there_ with you, you big ass!”

But Bull shook his head slowly. “I can’t let you see it.”

Stubborn jaw set. “I can’t leave you alone.”

He sighed. “I need you to, Krem. I need to…” But Bull didn’t have the right words for this. He groped for them, then gave up and dropped his hands, shoulders slumped. “Please.”

“ _No._ ”

Krem was being a hardass. Bull would have been proud and fond. But Bull was already gone away.

He couldn’t explain, because it was a thing better known to animals—an instinct—and animals didn’t use language. They just knew when it was time, and they walked off by themselves to die alone. It was like that—or it was like the dog lying on his master’s grave. Bull wasn’t sure which. Maybe both. He’d always said qunari were a little bit more savage than the other races, a little bit closer to the animal in some of their impulses. He just hadn’t known it would be quite like this.

But it didn’t matter. Flat and calm, Bull rested a hand on Krem’s shoulder. “I’m going. Alone. I know you need me to get through this, but it’s not gonna happen, Krem. Sorry for failing you…and him too. I always meant to try, if it came to this.” He shook his head and added the other hand to the other shoulder. “Sorry. Don’t…don’t think I’m quitting on you because I don’t love you, because I do, Krem. But it’s just…this is happening. It has to.”

Krem hugged him and never gave his consent, but not long after that Bull slipped away quietly one night, unseen. He knew how to lose pursuers, and the Chargers never found him.

He walked north. There was no destination, because every fiber in him knew he wouldn’t reach anywhere. He would just close the distance between himself and the last place that had held Dorian…until he couldn’t go any further.

He didn’t follow the roads. He walked as near to the path of the crow’s flight as terrain would let him. So it was in the middle of some obscure wood when Bull’s legs gave out on him. He sank down and leaned back against a tree. He had no idea where this was on any map.

At first, he meant only to rest a bit and get up again. But when he tried to shift to get his legs back under him, they wouldn’t go, and Bull realized the grass he was sitting on was doomed, because he wasn’t ever going to rise again.

Still, it took a while. He sat there, unmoving, half-bowed, the feeling seeping away from his extremities for two days—probably. Bull knew night fell more than once. He didn’t count beyond that.

“Sorry, Kadan,” he murmured, too cold to feel cold anymore. “I meant to try.”

Somewhere on another plane, he figured Dorian was annoyed with him and would have said that the evidence of his efforts was extremely lacking.

“I didn’t know until I was there, facing it. I couldn’t even get the thought into my head. Sorry, big guy…letting you down.”

Bull would like to think Dorian was forgiving him, wherever he was. Probably sticking to his complaints, but softening in them just that little bit that meant Bull was already forgiven.

“Guess I just can’t…without my Kadan.” He was speaking Qunlat, without noticing. But only Qunlat had the right words anyway. “Unbeaten, the blood stops,” he mumbled. The subtext in the words was heavy with the absence of the heart, but no one was there to hear and understand, or to hear and ask for a detailed grammatical explanation. So Bull just sighed, everything in him slowly shutting down.

The last breath that passed out of him was shaped like a whisper of “Dorian…” and then that was all.

No one found his body in that obscure place. Eventually, in the passing generations, as people moved further into the forest, a confused hunter found a pile of whitened bones, obviously qunari even without the horns, and he was left scratching his head, wondering how _this_ got here.

\--


	3. If Bull Dies First

Dorian knew something was wrong. Before the sending crystal stopped answering, he felt it, somehow. Cadash only confirmed what he already knew. _A battle…protecting a family of travelers and their kids…the enemy got lucky…_

It would take weeks for Dorian to get there. The funeral could never be delayed that long. Neither of them even mentioned such a thing. Cadash told him all this an hour before the pyre was lit, and Dorian listened with a white, cold face from the heart of blazing Tevinter.

Some part of Dorian must have managed to say goodbye to Cadash…out there beyond the ringing silence.

There are some sorrows in the world that cannot be described by tears. There is a wailing sorrow, for one—the mother screaming to the sky over the body of her child. Then, there is the pain too deep for any tears or any sounds at all—it can only be buried in silence and never, never looked at. To look is to break and to die.

Dorian’s Tevinter sky wouldn’t listen to him scream, so he buried the pain instead.

Magister Tilani watched him through the weeks and months, expecting him to drink himself to death. But Dorian didn’t. True to form as it might have been, he didn’t. He couldn’t. He’d buried something terrible. He couldn’t risk uncovering it accidentally. He became, after that, a man of moderation he had never been in the past.

Dorian also stopped laughing. He stopped talking when it was unnecessary. He was never cheerful or kind again.

He was still _good_. He fought corruption and protected the weak. He taught young alti how to dream for their nation and raised them to fight for it as he did. He was unwavering in his pursuit of justice and reform, lethal to his enemies, and loyal to his allies. But he was harsh, quiet, stern—a different man, from that day on.

Old friends tried to pick at it, in time. Tried to dig up what Dorian had buried. They meant well. They worried, and they wanted the old Dorian back. Magister Pavus went silent and left the room or cut off the conversation every time. The old Dorian wasn’t coming back. He was buried with the dead.

To their endless disgrace, none of his enemies ever managed to kill him. Magister Pavus lived a surprisingly long time for a Tevinter politician. He lay at last, withered and white-haired, on a bed he knew he wouldn’t rise from. He’d outlived many, many faces that had once been dear. Those who surrounded him now were young—too young. The oldest of them had only just been born the year the Inquisition was formed. None of them knew the old Dorian. None of them knew the names that old Dorian used to speak with a smile. None of them had ever seen his true smile.

But they were all blurring away into the darkness as his eyes faded. And here, now, Dorian found he could uncover what he had buried. Time hadn’t covered it any deeper or made it hard to find. When he turned toward it again, it was as easy as lifting a sheet and drawing it aside. And there was the love again.

“I didn’t let it stop me, Bull,” he whispered, to the confusion of his young protégés. “I didn’t waste a day.” His weak eyes watered. “Was it enough?”

“Who is he talking to?” one whispered. Helpless shrugs all around.

“Oh…” From the bed, the softest sigh. Onlookers watched with wide eyes, unable to quite believe the soft expression on the dying magister’s face—the man they had all believed must have been born brittle. Then: “ _Amatus_ …I have…missed you.”

That was the last thing Dorian Pavus said, and a little while later, he exhaled his last breath. The bright young futures of Tevinter couldn’t understand it at all. They’d expected their great leader’s last words to be some stoic but inspiring wisdom, a rallying call for the future, or a stern cautionary word. Not a tender murmur drenched with decades of longing.

But there was no one left who could explain it to them. It was a mystery, a story to become either legend…or lost.

\--


End file.
